Don't buy your iPad in a McDonald's car park

South Carolina fangirl finds herself fondling wood

A young woman in South Carolina has had her dream of buying a brand-new shiny iPad in the car park of a McDonald's crushed by two swindlers, who left her with a wooden dud.

The 22-year-old saw nothing suspicious in being approached by two men in the aforementioned car park nor in being offered an iPad for $300.

Claiming they had bought iPads in bulk, the fraudsters enticed the naive Apple fan by showing her an actual iPad and agreed to take $180 for it, which was all she said she had, according to a Spartanburg County Sheriff's report.

She was handed one of several FedEx boxes from the boot of their car and, presumably happy and satisfied with her lovely new purchase, she drove home without looking inside.

Imagine her chagrin when she opened the box at home only to discover "a piece of wood painted black with an Apple logo", as the report described it.

While not exactly the most cunning of disguises, you have to commend the effort and attention to detail. Those conmen sat down with their paints and didn't think it was enough to just splash a bit of black paint on the mockPad, it had to have that all-important Apple logo too. ®